[B-Greek] translating words
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sun Mar 9 05:54:14 EST 2003
At 8:11 PM -0800 3/8/03, neal massey wrote:
>I'm working on translating some Greek sentences and
>was wondering if anyone knows of any www sites that
>may help in translating Greek words to English. Sorry
>this is so basic. I know you guys are on a higher
>level than I am.
It's questionable whether the on-line Greek-English dictionaries are worth
the effort it requires to use them for what you say you're doing; you
really need to have a reasonably good beginning in Greek and know your
Greek alphabet backwards and forwards thoroughly; I would guess that an
inexpensive hand-lexicon such as Langenscheidt's might serve your purposes
better, but the simpler/smaller a lexicon or dictionary is, the less useful
it is in making any significant distinctions between the senses in which a
word may be used and the more danger there is of choosing a meaning from a
short list of English words, none of which really works very well in the
context of the Greek sentence you're looking at.
If you can follow the French, there's a pretty good listing of available
Greek dictionaries on line with a description of what each is at:
http://bcs.fltr.ucl.ac.be/DicLanAGr.html
The BST (Bible Search Tools) site has a search engine into which you can
enter words--this is keyed to Strong's numbers, at:
http://www.biblestudytools.net/Lexicons/Greek/?id=1
If you type in an alliterated form of the word (e.g. "logos," you'll get a
listing of several words containing that and can click on the one you want.
There is, of course, the Perseus site's LSJ on-line:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/lexindex?entry=fe/rw
That takes you to a page with the full definition of FERW, but on that page
there's a button, "search for another word", clicking on which will take
you to a search blank where you can choose ways of entering the Greek word
(by transliteration, by "beta-code" or by one of several Greek fonts to
which one can configure one's browser if one has the font in question in
one's system; using the simple transliteration scheme is easy because
there's a transliteration-diagram right on the search page. This will take
you directly to the word, if you have correctly spelled a word that's in
the lexicon. But this is very laborious and slow.
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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